There aren't any reliable tests, as it is all hardware dependent. As lm said, if something isn't put in a low power state it throws everything off.

My own tests on my desktop resulted in these power consumptions at idle:
Vista > XP Pro > Ubuntu

The difference was only a couple of watts though.

Overall it is a moot point. Five watts, eight hours a day, for a year is ~52.6 MJ, which is a tiny fraction of the energy that went into producing the computer (which is also very debatable and not well understood). If you are interested in the environmentally friendly way of doing things, linux wins hands down for its ability to outlast hardware. This would be as opposed to the other way around for Windows.

My notion is that it depends on which Linux distribution you choose out of the hundreds available. It seems logical that those which have less than, equal to or more bells and whistles than Windows will use, respectively, less than/equal to/more power... especially when you have it running on full bore with multiple power consuming programs.

Sounds reasonable - the less bells and whistles, the less power used. The other thing to look at is whether/how much the OS will allow you to control the undervolting/underclocking of your hardware, integrate with speedstep etc.

I think that's one are where my laptop lets me down - Ubuntu doesn't seem to be able to throttle back my HW when it's idle.

It also doesn't cope well with sleep or hibernate modes on my hardware - it goes OK initially, but after a few months it refuses to wake up. I've had the same problem on 4 installs of 2 distros on 2 laptops...

Granted, I have not tested the power consumption of any of these systems; it just seems logical: smaller + less fanciness = less resource (RAM, SSD or HDD) usage = less power consumption

If this notion is incorrect, why support monopolies in any case?

Many untested notions are born out of religious conviction. Please test your conviction with a watt-meter and get back to us.

Being an apatheist I lack the time for/interest in religious convictions. These notions are the result of my reasoning (reason being the classic philosophical-historical enemy of religon).
However, I agree with you that untested notions are risky business which can lead to all sorts of unwanted behavior. So, at the moment let's call it my hypothesis. I'll try to tack down the necessary tools, spend some time in my lab/man-cave and see if I can prove myself wrong or right and get back to the community with the results.

Although, in the case of the tiny RAM-based Linux systems I really can't imagine how HDD-based, gigantic Windows systems can even come close to competing in resource-watt consupmtion reduction. I could be wrong...

I don't get it. We can take electricity and convert it to heat. Has anyone been able to get heat back into electricity (without screwing around by boiling water and making steam and running a turbine to run a generator) directly? I mean then we could take these big beasts that put out like over 100W of heat and convert some of that back into power...so we lose less energy...

Linux has far better potential to go minimalistic and cause less load on cpu. But it can lack in other fields like using power saving features of your hardware, using standby/hibernate or even spinning down hard drives!
These features work 100% only on few distros if any, and often you need to manually tweak them to fully enable.

_________________#6) Plug in one device at a time, stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes, and hit the power switch with a toe

These features work 100% only on few distros if any, and often you need to manually tweak them to fully enable.

I've got hard disk spin down working on Arch with no trouble. I think mileage can vary between hardware and software and for a beginner it's probably not as obvious as just installing the drivers that come with your hardware as most non-enthusiast Windows users will do.

You do however have better control over power saving with Linux. Parameters for pretty much anything can be set and as this is all available on the command line you can have a custom setup running transparently through daemons.

In terms of less CPU usage, I think not having the anti-virus, firewall, annoying little applications that insist on running in the system tray and other nagware that most Windows systems run it's going to help a lot.

Would it generate enough energy to pay for itself, to make up for the energy involved in making, shipping, marketing, disposing of the peltier element?

Rather like the SPCR approach to noise - better to try to make it produce less noise to start with than to try to handle noise once produced. Likewise better to try to use less energy to start with.
For one thing - much of the energy is lost upstream from the "consumer" - generation losses, transmission losses, etc.
Using the heat directly (for climate control, etc.) might be a better bet.

There are lots of generators of waste heat - unless dealing with server farms, the heat generated by one personal computer is unlikely to be a significant part of your energy budget. (i.e. better payback by focus on efficiency and recovery in other areas - insulation, better control, more efficient climate control, transportation, etc.)

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